Moving South

On 12 June 2009 I announced in my blog post about a Twitter session I had presented, that I had accepted a new job in Southampton. Since then, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, I haven’t returned to the subject here on my blog. Yesterday I discovered that a friend had come here to find out what I was up to, having heard only the rumours – and found nothing. So I decided to bring my eager readers right up to speed with a look back over our journey of the last 4 months.

Having decided to move, we began our search for a school, somewhere to live in Southampton and in Loughborough (it’s a long drive every day!). We knocked off flat-hunting in 2 days (1 per place). We found a couple of great flats (the one down south being directly opposite Waitrose, which will reduce my carbon footprint!). Unfortunately, we’ve been caught up in the nightmare of sorting them ever since. Still nearly there, it looks like we’ll move into both over the weekend of 16 October – hurray! Just the small chore of finishing packing, filling /unfilling vans, unpacking and then hoping we’ve sent the right possessions to the right end of the country. I can’t wait for the fish and chips on the evening of 19th, oh, and of course, the return of the bins not long after 🙂

Finding a school was a nightmare – remind me why we had our child at the same time as all those millennium babies: all the schools where we wanted to live were full. All that is, except one, and it happened to be the nearest to the flat. We loved it on the visit and Pip spent the summer months showing off her uniform and waiting to start. So, she was the first of us to make the transfer to her new life. She started in early September. She loves it: she was elected onto school council and is a member of the journalism club who write the school newspaper – she’s got a great future ahead of her one way or another.

I started the new job on 21 September. What a privilege to be General Manager of Southampton Univeristy Students’ Union. It’s a dream of a Union: we enjoy enormous student participation, work with a great bunch of people (staff and students) and are located mainly on a leafy campus complete with a babbling brook and students sitting on the grass chatting. This really is the SU job of my dreams. I’ve loved the first couple of weeks getting to know my colleagues and I am looking forward to working with them to do the best we can to give our students the greatest university experience we can.

So that’s a relief! I had a massive feeling of trepidation driving in on the first day: what if I hated it? My fabulous husband and delightful daughter have agreed to support me on this big life adventure and relocate our lives. We are all massively rooted in Birmingham – all 3 born there and mostly lived all our life there. It was a big ask, so it needed to be worthwhile. Phew.

We’ve been living a travelling life. For the first 3 weeks, each was in a different B&B, hotel and apartment. My parents joned us for my first week at work, which was great. The last few weeks of waiting for our flat are being whiled away in the incredibly welcoming home of our old friend Dave and his family in Winchester. Dave coincidentally, welcomed me and my brothers to Birmingham when we moved back there in 1977.

We made friends with a great family, who relocated from Dorset in the summer and their youngest daughter started new in Pip’s class at the same time. They’ve regularly saved my childcare bacon and provided a cuppa and comfy sofa during those first few weeks when we lived in B&Bs. I’ve also met a couple of women who work at the University of Southampton, thanks to Twitter where a friend in Brum put us in touch. I even managed to go to a Tweet Up. That was such a great place to meet people and I will do all I can to be at the next one.

So all in all a lot to take in. The location is great; it’s not like Brum, but I don’t think anywhere can be quite as comforting as the place you’ve called home for the last 32 years. We’re saying goodbye to so many special people: friends and family. I will miss some of you dreadfully – I already do. But life is for living and just sometimes it’s invigorating to step right out of a comfort zone.

So, we’re still driving back up to Brum every Friday (I’d strongly advise against the A34 north round Oxford on Friday evening btw)! But hey, we get to pack more boxes every weekend and share time with our good friends. We’re gonna miss you lots, but not quite yet – which reminds me, it’s Thursday night, I should go and pack our bags…